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Atheists should make more noise

I’d like to tell you that I was one of those intelligent children who at age 11 gave the religion question careful thought and then alerted their parents that they wouldn’t be doing the church thing no more. Or that reading about the Holocaust had made me think of the open sky above Treblinka and wonder what kind of god didn’t care to notice the crematoria, especially when he could allegedly see a little sparrow fall.

In these cases, the first child is cerebral, the second anguished. I was simply oblivious and continue to be. Religion isn’t on my radar. Like the magnets in high school science experiments that repel each other rather than attract, I am programmed to tune out religious talk.

But atheism is an important phenomenon, and it is growing, the philosopher Alain de Botton now planning to build a $1.4 million (Cdn.) “temple for atheists” in London. There are a great many people like me but you rarely hear from us. Why would you? We don’t discuss this when we meet. It would be stupefying. Our lack of interest in religion bores even us.

That said, I am courteous about the beliefs of others. I unthinkingly accept whatever people say they believe in — not that they tell me because this is Canada after all — and don’t object unless it violates fairness, a concept left eternally undefined.

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If you like to stay current, you can’t simultaneously juggle all the elements that make up the news of the world. I follow politics, the arts, memoir and European history, with a minor in Spanish novelists, British comedy and American popular culture. My husband does economics, the history of the English language, meat-based cuisine, the novels of Graham Greene and soccer. The children have assigned themselves music, American fiction, social media and legal issues.

Religion sits on the kitchen table, orphaned.

The essayist Calvin Trillin has discussed the shuffling of expertise within families, my sigh of gratitude, for instance, when my husband agrees to cover Canadian Supreme Court issues, his relief that I have taken on the eurozone crisis. Last year I gave him American election financing law as a birthday gift. “You’re welcome,” I said, à la Trillin family, and he gave me climate change for Christmas.

Are all bases covered now? Not really. We regret our lack of expertise in religion. But that’s atheism for you. Religion sails past atheists like a paper airplane.

Here’s an example of my cluelessness: Last summer I wrote a column about a Don Mills school where imams conduct Islamic prayers in the cafeteria, with the boys at the front, the girls behind them and menstruating girls at the back in a sad little huddle.

I genuinely believed that parents and education officials who read this would object to two things: females being treated as second-class compared to boys, and students missing class time that would not be made up later. To me, religion had nothing to do with it.

What a dolt I was. I fully expected little bands of parent-protestors to show up at Valley Park with signs: Girls + Boys=Canada! We are the 99% for Grammar! End Tampon Shame!

Of course I was wrong. I was called a “gender Nazi,” whatever that may be. I heard from Muslims, any number of religionists who didn’t happen to like Muslims, incensed parents who put obedience over literacy, racists (many of these) and Angry Pyjamas (but I always hear from them) but I heard almost nothing from feminists or teachers.

This was a grave disappointment.

I shall try not to write about religion again, even inadvertently. For I am an atheist and we atheists have to keep our stick on the ice. We have no faith. We are polite. We do not believe. We are not interested in belief.

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